To measure how well the entire alphabet is suited to actual usage, I counted the number of strokes it would take to hand-write every letter in Peter Norvig’s text corpus.

For our current alphabet, that would be just shy of 7 trillion strokes.

Could it be better? Yes. The simplest change would be to re-assign letters that are already in our alphabet. For example, to swap “e” and “l”, so that the word “hello” would be written “hleeo”. This looks weird, but we’d get used to it. The result would be that the most-frequently used letter is also the easiest to write.

Pairing the new-letters with fewest strokes with old-letters with highest frequency, yields the following spreadsheet.

This has a total stroke count of a trillion fewer than the current alphabet system that we use. That is an efficiency boost of 15%.

To put things in perspective, let’s see how bad it could be.

The worst-case alphabet would make the most-frequent letters the hardest to write. This system would take over 9 trillion strokes. That is 33% worse than what we have now.

To put it another way, our current alphabet is 69% of the way from worst to best. It could have been worse, but there is tremendous potential for a new alphabet to get thoughts to paper more efficiently.